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The Drupal Association has grown an immense amount in the past year and we have been busy building a stronger Association. Last year the Drupal Association made a decision to shift to a staffed organization to better support the community. In this process we recognized that we had internal faults with our governance and board management that would prevent the Association from reaching its next level of growth. In the Fall of 2010 we began a process to evaluate and create a new structure to help support the Drupal community in the future.

At the recent Drupal Association retreat, the Association established that its number one priority for 2010 was to complete the Drupal.org redesign. Read the report.

The Drupal Association has been keeping tabs on the progress of the all-volunteer effort. After a review of the efforts to complete the redesign, the Association identified 5 resource-constrained projects which were preventing the volunteers from being able to complete the redesign.

Disclaimer

I am a permanent member of the Drupal association, and the director of business development for the association. I do not speak officially for the association, nor do I speak on behalf of the Drupalcon organizing committees. But I do have a blog and I want to have a discussion with the community about smart growth at Drupalcon. (*I've also helped raise approximately a million dollars for the association so they at least listen to me)

The Drupal association permanent member candidate submissions are due on Monday. Many candidates are applying to be elected as permanent members but I wanted to highlight non-elected members who do a lot to help the Drupal association. This is not an complete list of people who volunteer for the Drupal association, but a sample.

Last year, the Drupal Association hired Mark Boulton Design, with financial support from the community, to work with the Drupal community and re-design Drupal.org. The final design deliverable is the Drupal.org website style guide.

Webinar to educate implementers about drupal.org SEO

Next Wednesday, Dec 9th, at 12PM EST we will be hosting a webinar to help educate the re-design implementers on Drupal.org SEO techniques. All interested members of the Drupal community are welcome to register and attend the webinar.

We received word that people were unable to log into this webinar. We have recorded the webinar and will be posting it shortly for feedback

For the last year the Drupal.org redesign has progressed quietly and steadily. Almost 200 people have participated in the redesign by commenting, discussing, reviewing, testing, designing, theming, or writing code to get it done. We have had 6 re-design sprints (2 in Europe and 4 in the US) and built significant infrastructure to get the redesign development and staging ready for the community to make the final push. We are now asking Drupal consulting shops to step forward and help us implement one section of the redesign.

One of the biggest challenges in working in a large community like the Drupal community is removing bottlenecks. All too often the community can seem to come to a grinding halt on just one issue that can only be managed by one person. On Monday Dries gave a presentation at MIT and talked about how some of the Drupal community’s biggest problems have helped create some of our best solutions. In particular, he cited how our drupal.org server melt down in 2005 lead to the creation of the Drupal association to proactively manage and plan for our infrastructure growth.

The Drupal project will have a booth at Hostingcon, August 10-12th, in Washington, DC. This is the second year we will be at hostingcon meeting with members of the Drupal community and talking to hosting providers. The booth will be staffed by Eric Mandel, from Blackmesh hosting, members of the DC Drupal community, and Drupal hosting providers.